Those who have examined the history of this remarkable man and who
know how to estimate the friendlessness, the disabilities, and the
disadvantages which surrounded his childhood and youth; the scanty
opportunities, or rather the absence of all opportunity, of education;
the destitution and loneliness amid which he struggled for the
possession of knowledge; and the unflinching zeal and pertinacity with
which he provided for himself the materials for intellectual growth,
will heartily echo the popular judgment that he was indeed a man of
genius, marked out from his cradle to inspire, animate, and instruct
others.
[Footnote 43: From an article printed in the New York _Sun_, December
5, 1872. Greeley had died November 29, of this year.]
From the first, when a child in his father's log cabin, lying upon the
hearth that he might read by the flickering firelight, his attention
was given almost exclusively to public and political affairs. This
determined his vocation as a journalist; and he seems never to have
felt any attraction toward any other of the intellectual professions.
He never had a thought of being a physician, a clergyman, an engineer,
or a lawyer. Private questions, individual controversies had little
concern for him except as they were connected with public interests.
Politics and newspapers were his delight, and he learned to be a
printer in order that he might become a newspaper maker. And after he
was the editor of a newspaper, what chiefly engaged him was the
discussion of political and social questions. His whole greatness as a
journalist was in this sphere. For the collection and digestion of
news, with the exception of election statistics, he had no great
fondness and no special ability. He valued talent in that department
only because he knew it was essential to the success of the newspaper
he loved. His own thoughts were always elsewhere.
Accordingly there have been journalists who as such, strictly
speaking, have surpassed him. Minds not devoted to particular
doctrines, not absorbed in the advocacy of cherished ideas--in a word,
minds that believe little and aim only at the passing success of a
day--may easily excel one like him in the preparation of a mere
newspaper. Mr. Greeley was the antipodes of all such persons. He was
always absolutely in earnest. His convictions were intense; he had
that peculiar courage, most precious in a great man, which enables him
to adhere to his own line of action despite the excited appeals of
friends and the menaces of variable public opinion; and his constant
purpose was to assert his principles, to fight for them, and present
them to the public in the way most likely to give them the same hold
upon other minds which they had upon his own. In fact, he was not so
much a journalist, in the proper meaning of that term, as a
pamphleteer or writer of leading articles.
In this sphere of effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of
language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his
vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing
himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every
reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a
philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling rather than infallible
logic, so he never wrote above the heads of the public. What he said
was plain, clear, striking. His illustrations were quaint and homely,
sometimes even vulgar, but they never failed to tell. He was gifted
also with an excellent humor which greatly enlivened his writing. In
retort, especially when provoked, he was dangerous to his antagonist;
and tho his reasoning might be faulty, he would frequently gain his
cause by a flash of wit that took the public, and, as it were, hustled
his adversary out of court. But he was not always a victorious
polemic. His vehemence in controversy was sometimes too precipitate
for his prudence; he would rush into a fight with his armor
unfastened, and with only a part of the necessary weapons; and as the
late Washington Hunt[44] once exprest it, he could be more damaging to
his friends than to his opponents....
[Footnote 44: Governor of New York in 1851-53, having been elected by
the Whigs.]
The occasional uncertainty of his judgment was probably due, in a
measure, to the deficiency of his education. Self-educated men are not
always endowed with the strong logical faculty and sure good sense
which are developed and strengthened by thorough intellectual culture.
Besides, a man of powerful intellect who is not regularly disciplined
is apt to fall into an exaggerated mental self-esteem from which more
accurate training and information would have preserved him. But the
very imperfection of Greeley's early studies had a compensation in the
fact that they left him, in all the tendencies and habits of his mind,
an American. No foreign mixture of thought or tradition went to the
composition of his strong intelligence. Of all the great men who have
become renowned on this side of the Atlantic he was most purely and
entirely the product of the country and its institutions. Accordingly,
a sturdy reliance on his own conclusions and a readiness to defy the
world in their behalf were among his most strongly marked
characteristics.
But a kind of moral unsteadiness diminished his power. The miseries of
his childhood had left their trace in a querulous, lamentable,
helpless tone of feeling, into which he fell upon any little
misfortune or disappointment; and as he grew older he came to lack
hope.